topic How to Search for Characters after Special characters in a string in SAS Programming

How to Search for Characters after Special characters in a string

jmmedina252 — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 13:54:05 GMT

Hi, I have a string that I'm trying to get only a part of. The format of the original string is like this: '0000 - Stoney Lynn' and I want the function to output 'Stoney Lynn' with no trailing spaces or proceeding spaces. There is not a standard amount of spaces between the dash: '0000-Stoney Lynn'. Also sometimes the dash appears to be a longer dash not recognized as '-'. This is why I think a function looking for characters after any special character may work better and then trim any extra spaces.

Heres what I have tried so far: subjectname=trim(compress((substr(subjectid,5)),'-'))

But some of the output comes back with a dash still and the spaces dont trim correctly.

Re: How to Search for Characters after Special characters in a string

Kathryn_SAS — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 14:07:32 GMT

You can use the SCAN function to extract text after a dash. If it is a regular dash, you can use the following:

subjectname=strip(scan(subjectid,2,'-'));

If it is a long dash, you can use the hex representation:

subjectname=strip(scan(subjectid,2,'96'x));

You can look at a variable in hex using a format:

format subjectid $50.;